Salesforce.com's CEO Discusses Q4 2011 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Transcript by:

Salesforce.com (CRM)

Q4 2011 Earnings Call

February 24, 2011 5:00 pm ET

Executives

Graham Smith - Chief Financial Officer, Principal Accounting Officer and Executive Vice President

Marc Benioff - Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

David Havlek -

Analysts

Laura Lederman - William Blair & Company L.L.C.

Brendan Barnicle - Pacific Crest Securities, Inc.

Adam Holt - Morgan Stanley

Patrick Walravens - JMP Securities LLC

Heather Bellini - ISI Group Inc.

Brent Thill - UBS Investment Bank

Brad Zelnick - Macquarie Research

AjayKumar Kasargod

Mark Murphy - Piper Jaffray Companies

Kash Rangan - BofA Merrill Lynch

Presentation

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Marvin, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the fiscal's Q4 and full-year results conference call. [Operator Instructions] I'll now turn the call over to our host, Mr. David Havlek. Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

David Havlek

Thanks, Marvin, and welcome everyone to Salesforce.com's Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2011 Earnings Call. Joining us remotely today is Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO. And here in San Francisco, I'm joined by Graham Smith, our CFO. Following our prepared remarks today, we'll open things up for your questions. We are going to try to get to as many of you as possible, so as a courtesy to your peers, please limit yourself to one question today.

A complete disclosure of our fourth quarter results can be found in our press release issued about an hour ago, as well as in our Form 8-K filed with the SEC. Additional financial information, including detailed historical financial statements and facts, is also available on our website.

Our commentary today will primarily be in non-GAAP terms. Reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for both our reported results and our forward guidance can be found in our press release.

At times in our prepared comments or in responses to your questions today, we may offer incremental metrics to provide a greater understanding of our business or our quarterly results. Pleased be advised that some of these disclosures are onetime in nature and we may or may not update these metrics in the future.

With that, let me make this call official with a brief Safe Harbor. The primary purpose of today's call is to provide you with information regarding our fiscal fourth quarter 2011 performance. Some of our discussion or responses to your question may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Should any of these risks or uncertainties materialize or should our assumptions proved to be incorrect, the actual company results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

All the risk, uncertainties and assumptions, as well as other as well as other information on potential factors that could affect our financial results, are included in our reports filed with the SEC, including our most recent Form 10-Q particularly under the heading Risk Factors.

To access our Q4 press release, including the GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations, our historical results, any of our SEC disclosures or simply to learn more about www.salesforce.com, I encourage you to visit our Investor Relations website at www.salesforce.com/investor. In addition to the webcast, today's call will be available for 90 days, and a dial-in replay will be made available through March 23.

Finally, before I turn the call over to Marc, please be advised that we may reference certain unreleased services or features that are not currently available on today's discussion. We can't guarantee the future timing or availability of these services or features as such customers who purchase our services should make the purchase decision based on services and features that are currently available.

With that, let me turn the call over to Marc to discuss our Q4. Marc?

Marc Benioff

Thanks, David. Our fourth quarter was an extremely strong finish to a fantastic year. And let me begin by briefly reviewing some of our financial highlights.

Revenue for the fourth quarter was 29% from the year ago to $457 million. For the full year, we delivered approximately $1.66 billion, an increase of 27% from fiscal year '10, and we exited the year with an annual revenue run rate that now exceeds $1.8 billion.

Non-GAAP EPS of $0.31 rose 3% from the year-ago period, even as we accelerated our investment in key areas of growth. We also set a company record for cash flow in the quarter delivering approximately $170 million in operating cash, an increase of more than 80% year-over-year. For the full year, operating cash flow rose approximately 70% to roughly $460 million or 28% of revenue in fiscal year '11.

Our multi-products strategy is really taking off. Not only was Q4 the best quarter in our history, we also signed more new business from each of our sales, service, collaboration and platform clouds than ever before.

In the fourth quarter alone, we signed two eight-figure transactions, including our largest deal ever, and more than 30 seven-figure deals. Also, we added approximately 5,100 net new customers in the quarter, excluding customers from Heroku and Dimdim, taking our global customer community to more than 92,300.

For the full year, we added approximately 20,000 net new customers and more than 1 million net new subscribers. We now have a global community of more than 3 million net gain subscribers.

Given strong Q4 demand and a strong pipeline of new business, we're pleased to be able to raise revenue guidance of $2.03 billion to $2.05 billion for fiscal year '12. This will make Salesforce.com the first enterprise cloud-computing company to generate more than $2 billion in revenue by the end of this year.

Read the rest of this transcript for free on seekingalpha.com